


Edge of the Map

by fabella



Category: Hemlock Grove
Genre: Angst and Feels, Codependency, Dark, Destiny Rumancek does what she has to, Dystopia, End of the World, Evil Child, Future Fic, Guilt, M/M, Magic, Near Future, Olivia is in a good mood about everything, POV Peter, Peter copes as well as he can, Possessive Behavior, Post-Season/Series 02, Resolved Romantic Tension, Roman is a good father, Starting Over, Suicide Attempt, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Werewolves, a godfrey gets what he wants, happy evil family, roman is not really evil though just a bit not good, seductive Roman makes Peter weak in the knees, sex with feelings, upirs, world construction
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-11-19
Updated: 2014-11-19
Packaged: 2018-02-26 07:24:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2643179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fabella/pseuds/fabella
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Roman embraces a new world. Peter deals. Making a relationship work at the end of times is about as complicated as you'd expect.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Edge of the Map

Peter ghosts across America.

He’s seen it all before, with Lynda. It was different then, traveling as a child with his mother a hand reach away, her sun baked skin a laughing moment from creasing into a smile. The travel is muted now: shades of gray when he legs it into towns, different variations of brown when he keeps to the mountain trails. For a while, he stays toward the top of the country, edges into Canada, and since it is the end of October, all the trees are naked and colorless. They extend like rigid old hands to the sky.

In North Dakota, he crashes in an abandoned schoolhouse for nearly a week. It is as old as Olivia, give or take a century, and sits in the middle of a prairie, all the windows busted out, wooden slats surrounding it in the grass like a shed skin. He sleeps in the yellow music room, near a battered piano missing most of its keys. There he settles his sleeping bag, and huddles into himself for warmth, hood drawn over his head until it reaches his nose. Each morning he wakes to the frame that was once a ceiling and the sky. 

A bird has made a nest in the collapsing beams. It shouldn’t be here still, at this time of year, but it is dying. Peter kisses his necklace and says a prayer, raising two fingers to the bird. It turns its head at him, one black eye watching. He eats candy bars for breakfast, cold ravioli out of a can for lunch and dinner. The water is running out, so he drinks very little. 

Sometimes the bird flies away and returns with a worm. Mostly the bird sleeps.

Peter stays there until after the full moon, and the turn. When the wolf limps back to the schoolhouse after a brutal run, the shape of the piano in the dark makes him whimper. The silence of it is stark in a room used to noise. Peter wakes up sad, naked and shivering, nose wet. The bird is stiff in its nest when Peter checks. It’s time to go south, where the winters are easier. Roman would expect Peter to go south.

Instead, Peter hikes to the nearest town with his canvas army bag heavy on his sore shoulders. The town is roughly two miles east of the river. He sees it first from the hill above through air fogged by his own breath: ruler straight rows of monopoly houses side lit by the morning sun, ribs of yellow light reaching across telephone wires. Peter holds his side and limps down the hill. The transformation is harder on a man in his thirties than it had been for a boy.

He stops in front of a church, stares at the red spray paint scrawled across the front doors:

_**the whole world lieth in wickedness**_

Peter hobbles on.

He finds a mountain bike parked behind the third house he checks. An orange cat observes Peter from the distance of a second level window, blinking slowly when Peter shields his eyes to return the indecipherable attention. It turns away after a moment, vanishing behind the yellow curtain. Peter smashes a window with his elbow in passing. Just in case. He pulls the bike free of overgrown weeds and takes it to the road, where he checks the chain and tests the pedals. His knee unlocks when he climbs onto the bike to give it a bouncing test against the pavement.

“You’ll do,” he says, to say something.

The cat is outside when Peter pedals away, sitting upright by the mailbox, watching something in the sky with her tail flicking in apparent excitement. He wonders what she sees and how she sees it. If there is anything to be seen. The canvas bag sways rhythmically on his back as he leans on the handlebars, necklace flopping back and forth across his collarbone, tires humming on the road. Peter listens. This bike and his body are the center of the known universe.

Around noon, sun above his shoulders, Peter follows the road signs to the interstate. He stops at a gas station to replenish water and lighters. He eats a handful of ibuprofen and a jar of pickles with his butt cheeks planted on the counter by the register, booted feet swinging slowly while he rests. 

The newspaper he reads is dated seven months ago, a Sunday edition. He’s read it before, but there is a letter to Annie that he likes: a woman is in her first year of college on her parents dime, but she’s realized that she doesn’t want to go to college at all. Everything is moving too quickly for her, and she’s afraid to tell them that she just wants a smaller life. She fears disappointing her dad most of all. She sounds like a nice girl. Peter pictures her with a long strawberry blonde braid, and dirty blue jeans. She hikes by his side. In this fantasy, she looks like Letha, and talks a lot, and Peter never has to hear his own thoughts again.

Before he leaves, Peter takes a dump in the employee bathroom, sits on an actual toilet seat, who gives a fuck if its cold or dirty, and uses actual toilet paper, and is human for ten minutes.

This is the next week of Peter’s life, give or take:

He pedals I90 to the very edge of Washington, until he runs out of road. The interstate is the quickest route, despite the obstacles presented by the cars. He stops only to sleep, and sometimes to scavenge for clothes and food. The aches from turning fade away to muscle memory and he makes better time. When he needs to, Peter relieves himself in the woods. It doesn’t really matter where he pisses, as long as its not on his own boots, but leftover inhibition takes him away from the road.

Coyotes regard Peter from the tops of abandoned SUVS, lifting their heads when he rides past. They’ve taken over this part of the country with their large families. Their ears might twitch when they see him, but there is a lack of wariness in their bodies, especially the younger coyotes, who have never seen one of him before. At night, Peter often wakes to the sound of their claws scraping and clicking over metal as bands of them pass the car he is sleeping in, climbing the abandoned vehicles as if they had sprouted out of the ground.

Somewhere between Montana and Idaho, Peter dreams of Roman. In this dream, Roman sits on a bench in the middle of a sunny field, with a young girl’s chubby arms wrapped around his neck as she hugs him from behind. They tip their golden heads toward each other and their temples bump. She is wearing a white dress with a red bow at her waist, and she laughs when Roman suddenly stands, lifting her with him, and kicks her legs wildly behind him. One of her shiny black shoes fall off and is forgotten.

In the dream, Roman’s smile takes up his whole face. Peter sees his mouth forms words, but the silence is perfect and absolute. Peter doesn’t even hear his own footsteps as he approaches, or the sound of his heart, which pounds painfully in his chest. He does know that he means to kiss Roman on the mouth and the little girl on her forehead. That is what his mouth is for. Roman and the girl look up when he is before them. Her eyes are electric blue over Roman’s shoulder. Her name is Nadia.

Peter wakes to a dark upholstered ceiling, sweating. He has a fever.

He spends the rest of his ride in a miserable daze, stopping here and there between ruts in the road to wipe his runny nose. Something rattles deep in his chest when he pedals too fast. Before the next day is out, he begins to cough. He is a day away from the coast when he has to take most of a day off. He takes the last of his ibuprofen and sleeps in a rusty green Toyota truck until dawn, waking himself up coughing. He spits mucous into the foot well and lets his fever burn the leather seats.

The following morning, Peter reaches the ocean. 

He smells the tang of it first, and takes the next exit, bike tires skidding sharply as he picks up speed. He rides blindly past beach cottages with doors blown wide open or entirely off. Sand has begun consuming the roads, reclaiming low to the ground benches and porches. The pedaling grows more difficult the closer he gets to the noisy concussion of waves as they plow into the edge of the world, and eventually, he has to stop, walk beside the bike and push it. He drops it in the grass when he reaches the beach.

Before him, the winter ocean is alive. Waves foam over the shore, pushed continuously forward by the cold wind. Sunlight glints over the dark water and turns it into glass panes. He drops to his knees. The canvas bag falls to the sand beside him.

This is it. This is as far as he can go. The world might as well be flat.

Peter closes his eyes, and inhales.

He pictures Lynda: ripped blue jeans, pant legs rolled up to her knees, ankle bracelet flashing bright gold where she buries her toes in the sand, leg hair slowly drying as water evaporates. She smiles at him, pinches his cheek.

He stays like that for what might be an hour, on his knees in the sand, watching the water swallow bits of sand and return it to the ocean. It is alive, but it is far beyond him in scope. None of what he has ever done in his life has made a bit of difference to it. In this way, Peter has done nothing wrong.

When it gets dark, Peter pulls a handgun from the bag. It’s a little thing. It fits easily in his hand. He puts the barrel in his mouth, shoves it in as far as he can, until he gags on it, and angles it downward, toward his spinal column. His tongue flutters, licking the metal, and drool slips from the corners of his lips. Peter hesitates. He wishes he’d smoked another cigarette, had a good bottle of moonshine, could fuck a girl one more time, wishes he’d never fallen in love with the devil himself, and squeezes his eyes shut so tightly he sees sparks. He presses the trigger.

He opens his eyes sometime later, on his back, to a sun that looks farther away. His ears are ringing and his throat hurts. When he sits up, the world spins, and Roman is crouched before him in a black jacket that flaps in the wind. A burning cigarette dangles from his fingers where his hands rest over his knees. He looks as young as he did when Peter first left him, and as needlessly dramatic.

“You’ve ruined another shirt,” Roman says.

“Yeah,” Peter says, voice rough, “but my cough is gone.”

Of course, _son-of-a-bitch-fate_ , that’s when Peter coughs.

Roman grins, using every tooth in his vicious mouth, and flicks the cigarette away. He latches onto Peter’s face with both hands and slams Peter to the ground by the mouth. He tastes like iron. Frustrated tears burn Peter’s eyes, but he kisses back with every ounce of regretful life left in him, clutching Roman’s bony shoulders with fingers covered in his own dry blood. Roman fucks him there in the sand. Peter urges him on, grunting and filthy, the jacket under them, his jeans caught around one boot. Roman won’t let Peter look away. He holds Peter’s jaw with one hand, eyes as inescapable as the edge of the map.

**Author's Note:**

> A lot of research was done in the process of outlining and writing this story. Weird things like the most efficient way to commit handgun suicide, and the location of abandoned schoolhouses, and what to call a group of coyotes. This is my vision of a future with Nadia in it, and it's a doozy, and morally corrupt, and very loving all the same, and yes, a bit too wordy at times, so I hope you enjoy the ride. The next few chapters are longer than this one, but it felt right to end this one here, with Peter just caught back in Roman's nefarious and tender grasp. I know a lot of people don't like to read works in progress, so I'll give you a heads up: I'm a slow writer. I can't imagine I'll be finished writing this for a few months at least. Hang in there with me!


End file.
